


A Change of Heart Is More Like A Slow Self-Transplant

by sharlatanka



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Tevinter Inquisitor, alistair still hasn't grown up, peppy optimistic wardens meet jaded burdened Inquisition, slight mention of abuse, the gang is all here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 01:57:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12877743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharlatanka/pseuds/sharlatanka
Summary: When Warden Theirin is welcomed to Skyhold without the Hero of Ferelden by his side, Cullen must also welcome old, unwelcome memories of his former life as a Templar when fear, desire, and fanaticism led to a kind of possession unlike the ability of any demon.  He thinks about how his past affects his current relationship with the Inquisitor Lucilla Radona, a magister's daughter from Minrathous and unashamed mage.





	A Change of Heart Is More Like A Slow Self-Transplant

**Author's Note:**

> Fic cross-posted from my tumblr. I haven't been on a fanfiction site in a long time, since FF.net! I'm hoping to write more with Lucilla, who arrived at the conclave because she felt it would be an auspicious occasion to ask to purchase an artifact. She's hard-headed, intense, and unlearning the Tevine life she knows so well.

The war room is tense with him there, more tense than usual. The other half of the Hero of Ferelden. Friend to the spymaster and even the untrustworthy dark-haired witch. Welcome comic relief to the rest. A bad memory for Commander Cullen Rutherford.

“Where is your wife, Warden Theirin?”

“When did you get so formal, Leliana?”

“I’m hoping it helps me forget the one time you tried to use a dagger to clean your ears.”

“Just the one time you saw that, was it? It was your dagger. I could not have saved Ferelden with clogged ears. But Galya-- Galya had some business at Kinloch Hold. She sends her regards and told me she didn't want to visit until you all had cleaned this fortress up, and she also didn't want me to tell you she said that.”

“All that time in the circle, but she was still a noble’s brat! I think she would get along quite well with our Inquisitor.”

Galya. Lucilla. They were alike in more ways than Cullen wished to admit. He looked up from his notes for a moment towards the two friends, he, alone with his ink-splotched fingers at the other side of the table.

“That's right, commander! Heard this new savior-of-the-world is fresh from a gilded estate in Minrathous.”

Cullen cleared his throat. “Correct… unfortunately caught in the conclave as a visiting diplomat.”

“And how is she?” He took a seat on the edge of the table near the commander, flashing a genteel grin.

Alistair was a gracious kind of man-- willing to walk across the table when they had butted heads on the worst and came out the moral victor. After Alistair fell in love and saved Ferelden, Cullen simply became worse.

“She is… hard-headed. But professional.”

“At least you have that going for you all. Difficult to understand how things ended the way they did, seeing as how Galya and I were basically newborn babes, stumbling around.”

The former knight-commander remembered for a moment, how she was the very same at the circle. Proud, yet clumsy. They were both barely twenty. When he had first seen her, he had responded to the noise of heavy, ancient books falling. They’d fallen onto her, and in turn she had fallen off of a rolling ladder.

_Robes hiked, one velvet-slippered foot twisted between two stiff rungs of the ladder, a dusty epic canticle bent open over her face, elbows slipping on other titles that littered the floor. Copper curls were freeing themselves from her tight braids. She looked so small. He didn't know where to begin to unravel the scene. He didn't know where to look, or not look._

_“What happened, apprentice?” He began to pick up the tomes that littered the ground, starting with the one on her face. Her upturned nose was red from the impact, the rest of her face was flushed from frustration._

_“One of them… one of them was stuck. I needed… I needed the, uhm…” Without even bothering to pick herself up, she began to rifle through the books he’d stacked at his feet, scanning them with her worryful, heavy doe eyes._

_“Leave those!” He snapped, perhaps a bit too loudly, even for himself. He saw her eyes becoming wet and red. It made their washed-out green color a bit brilliant, like peridot, he thought. She was rather pretty, in a way he didn't think she would understand. It wasn't as if he was taught to have any sympathy for her kind, anyway. He still felt a bit bad for scaring her; although, as a new, young Templar, his tempered and trained severity made him a little proud of himself._

_He kneeled next to her and took hold of her caught leg at the shin (when was the last time he had touched another person for more than sparring since he had been an initiate?). He was reminded of when he released baby deer caught in fences on the family farm in Honnleath. They stumbled away, alone, bleating, clumsy. His father said it was no use, they would die without mothers. Easier to slaughter them at the fence._

_She didn't make a sound, but tensed and winced as he freed her from the ladder. A tear rolled down her right cheek, pressed against her shoulder as she propped herself up on her elbows._

_“You should be more careful.” He remarked, standing again to hoist her up. She winced again, but made no move to say that her foot still troubled her._

_“I’m sorry.” She sniffed. A heavy breath shuddered through her chest._

_“You weren't thinking.” He went further. “These things are valuable. And if you want to be a fool again, maybe I won't be here to help you. Who knows what would happen then?”_

_She smiled weakly. He went a bit weak, too. “You're right. I'm sorry. I think this place makes us a bit frail.”_

_“Your lot are frail to begin with.”_

_She smiled sadly in acknowledgement. “That's what your lot are for.”_

_“Sure. I’m Rutherford, by the way. Cullen. Cullen Rutherford.”_

_“Oh… Galya. Galina Amell.”_

_“Valka.” He repeated. The name rolled and popped in his mouth. “I’m going to have to report this incident, in case any circle property was damaged.”_

_She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robe. It saturated an even darker green where she’d stained it. “Huh…” she chuckled through a shudder. “Like me?”_

_“I should take you to the infirmary.”_

_She sputtered. “I have too much to do, I--”_

_“You're going. Come on.”_

He became absolutely besotted with her; with the power he had over her from the role he occupied, her perceived helplessness, with the way he could come to know her without speaking with her, watching her, reading dossiers, with knowing he could control a woman who understood a life of little other than subjugation. She was a pretty thing in a cage she was too pitiful to see for herself.

He thought that it was love. When he expressed to her this dressed-up possession she was at first resistant. However, having known only a life of being controlled, first as a noble daughter and then as an apprentice, she acquiesced when he told her that yes, this is what love is, how it is on the outside.

He comforted himself later by assuring himself that he was no sexual menace; he was as inexperienced in matters of the heart as she was. He was only a boy deprived of tenderness that thought that power would bring it back to him.

It was the taste of a final refused kiss that he spat out time and time again like acid as he condemned her kind.

_"The image of the poor, chained apprentice is a powerful one. And one the mages are more than willing to exploit."_

The fixation became fanaticism. Mages were fickle, destructive, senseless. But not her, not her, the world chanted, Amell has a gold heart, a heroic soul. The thoughts would trickle from the lyrium headaches, from the pressure behind his eyes to the knot in his stomach. _She had a good heart, a heroic soul, and she rejected you._

He became older, perhaps none the wiser, but all the more ashamed. To apologize would be demanding attention she didn't have to give, just like back at the circle. Cullen Rutherford realized he had never been in love. He had only been another instrument of someone’s oppression, and had taken advantage of the fact that she did not recognize it as such.

“Warden,” he spoke up suddenly, to the surprise of Alistair, who had gone back to reminiscing and inquiring with the spymaster about their old companions. “Is the reason Amell-- your wife-- she… is the reason she isn't here… well, is it me?”

He was startled when Alistair burst into a laugh. “Why would that be? Because you once had a schoolboy crush?”

“Well…” Was it possible she would not have told him? She was always the proud kind. Perhaps the memories didn't make her suffer for as long as it rightly did him. “I suppose that is rather foolish of me to presume.”

“Don't worry yourself, commander. I'm sure you know how she likes to keep herself busy.”

Leliana cocked her head towards the sound of heated Tevine spoken outside the hall. “And our commander has no need of childhood crushes anymore, does he?”

“Hm? What does that mean?”

“Cullen and our dear Inquisitor, Lucilla Radona. Who is out there… arguing with the archivist.”

“Bookish, laden with responsibility… don't you have a type, commander!”

Cullen’s face burned red. “It isn't like that.”

But it was, wasn't it? Even when he peeled back the sickness of power he found he still admired intelligence, and that delicate kind of woman. A healthy love revealed that he also admired ambition and quick wit.

She didn't appear dissimilar, he thought, and saw the same thought on Alistair’s open face as she swept past the open door with her Tevine compatriot. Her hair was darker auburn, much less prone to popping out from the tight coils she twisted up with gold chain. Her large, icy eyes were shaded by heavy eyelids. Her robes were tightly tailored and embroidered in the Tevinter style she was so reluctant to trade in. The sharp angles of her face completed the ensemble. Unlike his misguided affection so long ago, he didn't perceive her as a helpless animal; she was a force in her own right.

“Any news from your research?” Leliana asked.

She rolled her eyes and let Dorian shoulder the weight of the large book they had been carrying jointly. He cursed at her, she ignored it. They cared for each other.

“The stained glass in the great hall is completely shoddy-- it must be redone if we are to appear like we have even a hint of professionalism.”

“We also think we’ve uncovered the previous identity of Corypheus,” Dorian added triumphantly, “I do not know why that didn't come first.”

“This is what we were arguing about,” she barely took a breath, managing to be eloquent while completely wrapped up in her thoughts. “I ask you now which is the most pressing issue and do not answer yet let us weigh the facts. One: the identity of Corypheus could be incorrect; two: at the moment there is nothing to do with that information that would not take weeks of correspondence; three: if I have to look at imperfect glass that I know others notice-- and know they judge it-- for another day I _will_ kill myself.”

“Do you promise?” Dorian posited.

“Oh please. I’d take you with me.”

“ _Festis bei umo canavarum_.” He laughed slightly.

Leliana stepped between the two and the grey warden. “Alistair, you've met our Inquisitor. And our archivist, Dorian.”

“Only in the fray. It's good to see you when we aren't getting killed.”

“Best not to speak too quickly.” Dorian remarked.

“Of course. Might I say… I don't ever recall seeing mages work so calculatedly as you both.”

Dorian shrugged. “Noble mages are bred and trained in Minrathous like prize animals. You all lock them away and pretend they don’t exist, and hunt them when they do.”

“You have begun to come around.” Lucilla remarked, smiling warmly at Cullen, who had stood as soon as they had walked in. “Even your templars don't mind so much, now.”

“Former, uh--” he cleared his throat. “Former templar.”

Alistair stepped up to peak at the book. “If you have any new information, I’d be eager to hear it.”

The spymaster and warden both followed the archivist out through the hallway where a discussion began even before there was any room to put the book down.

“What are you doing?” Lucilla approached the war table, trying to put together all of the scattered papers there into a coherent activity.

“Reading correspondence… marking troop activity… sending correspondence.”

“Can you show me?” She took a seat next to him, and he allowed himself to tiredly sit as well. “Or have you been working for too long? If I learn, I could help you.”

“Is that really why you want to learn?” He asked. He knew her, this time from asking, and talking, and laughing, and crying.

She pursed her lips. “A bit. Mostly I worry whether I could be doing it better. Whether it’ll all fall apart if I’m not doing it all.”

“That's what I figured.”

She had come from her own kind of cage; however, she had always known it's dimensions. It was fear, rather than naïveté, which kept her in. T was fear of being a hated outsider in a foreign land that caused her to lean on her clothing, her language from home. It was her fear of failing her family first, then failing everyone else, which caused her to pull out her hair nights, to wail and sob until there was no more left in her, then rise the next morning and act as if she had never wept in her life. That, Dorian had told Cullen once, was the most Tevine thing about her.

Cullen had watched Lucilla transform from someone who understood empathy in the abstract into someone who understood the gravity of losing even one life. Her changes of heart gave him hope within himself. Although they had begun their acquaintance wary of each other, her life as a magister’s daughter allowed her to understand his life as a Templar; for all their differences the ideological pressures were much the same.

She watched him do his work for a bit, and pointed out here and there with slim jeweled fingers where he could send a battalion, and what did he think about that?

“Lucilla,” he swallowed hard, not believing he was bringing the matter up, himself, “if I had something I wanted to tell you, but I’m not sure it's understandable… by any stretch of the imagination… what would you say to it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something in the past that made me ashamed.”

She looked into his eyes for a moment and searched his face. Finding he must be sincere, she matched the expression. “I do have an idea about that. Since the past is really of little consequence currently, let's leave it all… for now, and when this is all over, we can go to a mountaintop somewhere and battle it out over what we're ashamed of. There are some things I could say, as well.”

It didn't exactly dissuade him. “You must learn to forgive yourself, like I do.”

“Like you try to do.”

“Like you told me to try to do. Take your own advice.”

He exhaled, feeling the slightest bit relieved.

“Oh, Cullen…” she cooed. He thought she had more to say. As it turned out, it was on a different topic. “You got ink on your face again. How do you do that?” She smudged the spot off of his cheek with her thumb before kissing the same spot, leaving a deep red lip stain mark. “Let me help you with this writing so that you can help me fix this stained-glass problem. And your handwriting is atrocious, just look at this….”

He was certain he had never loved a woman before, or more, than her.


End file.
